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38 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP As crimes against nature, acts of resistant sodomy were not to be spoken, indeed could not be spoken, because to do so threatened the stability of social relations structured as intersecting networks of discourse. The imposition of silence on sodomy preceded and preserved the homosocial speech acts mandated by Shaftesbury. That is, Shaftesbury’s philosophical system can be understood as an attempt to reduce speech and gesture to identificatory practices so that it became impossible to use language without speaking or showing the truth about one’s self. This is the demand that language (speech, gesture) should lay bare the unique “I” as the most interesting “fact” of the language act. As a way of using language to unidentify from Shaftesbury’s “I,” molly parodies should have remained unspoken/unrecognized; once recognized, however, they had to be critically reevaluated. PERFORMING AKIMBO: FINAL NOTES ON CAMP The development of perspective enabled the assertion of bourgeois subjectivity by re-creating the spectating eye as the origin and owner of the field of vision. 13 ‘The claim of perspective to represent a mathematical order of precisely plotted places depended on an arbitrarily assigned vanishing point. The vanishing point provided an origin for the scene and enactment of perspective; by means of it, all other objects and actions were clarified (resolved). Shaftesbury’s philosophical system, in turn, depended on the internalization of that vanishing point as conscience. Against all this, mannerism resisted the vanishing point with a gesture of deflection—the arm set akimbo, the body in contrapposto. 14 The mannerist substitution of a gesture of deflection where there should have been a vanishing point attempted to make critical resolution (self-knowledge) unattainable. To be “akimbo”—that proud mannerist gesture—was to be at odds with the normal drive of bourgeois ocularcentrism. Bourgeois criticism may be understood, then, as that which reinscribed the gesture of deferral back into the social order, rereading the mannerist gesture as not (un)identification but indication. The extravagant gesture, argued its critics, drew the eye inward (hermeneutically) to a unique subjectivity which (and this was the ultimate task of middle-class morality) could then be realigned with the measure of things. The success of bourgeois ocularcentrism is apparent in Hogarth’s drawing of Antinous and the dancing master. Hogarth’s joke seems to ask us to see beyond deflection, to see critically the arm set akimbo and the body in contrapposto as indicative of an unspoken, but open, secret about the nature of their relationship. We are to “see” the comic difference between the illustration and Hogarth’s philosophical/ aesthetic system, a difference which Hogarth made visible as homosexuality. Represented as nothing in itself, homosexuality at the same time must register whatever difference the critic wants us to “see” there. Against this, molly gestures could not have blocked out (bourgeois) content, as Sontag wrote of Camp, or created a new phallic plenitude, as a recent and prominent essay has argued. 15 Rather, these gestures reopened the field of the
PERFORMING “AKIMBO” 39 political in which identifications were embodied and performed. By preserving the complexity of the political references of gestures like setting the arms akimbo, mollies, fribbles, and fops may have foregrounded, contested, and coped with the processes by which the bourgeois ideology invaded and inscribed their bodies. One twentieth-century meaning of “akimbo” demonstrates the final outcome of the historical struggles surrounding this gesture. In 1943, Ivor Brown noted that “akimbo” could mean either “high horse” or overly theatrical (24). As the former, akimbo connotes a performance exceeding taste. As the latter, it also signals excess; but as an excess of theatricality, it registers the very nothingness underlying performance. This is the curious circle, the knack, I have traced in this essay—in the one direction, excess; in the other, nothingness. And yet in the epistemological prejudices underlying bourgeois psychology, excess and nothingness can appear as each other: excess and nothingness pivot around “realness” as two kinds of specters/spectacles. On the one hand, conspicuous display of a gesture like arms akimbo registered the excess that displaced bourgeois identifications; on the other, pride and sodomy coalesced as markers of the status of aristocracy as no-thing in itself, an identity misplaced and misspoken. What was once a gesture registering sprezzatura, the inherent legitimacy of the aristocracy, connoted the very (homosexual) instability of self for which they were criticized by the bourgeoisie. Later on, as I have shown, excess and nothingness became opposite ends of a ray curving in and meeting to form the concept of homosexuality as at once offstage and antecedent to normative sociality. Shaftesbury’s primary discourse of the self—the occupation of the “I” as the basis of all other knowledges and all epistemological certainty— contributed to a concept of homosexuality as both the excessive (or narcissistic) speaking of the self and the dispossession of self, the speaking of an identity that had no place. The homosexual’s flamboyance and narcissism became understood as a compensation for (and, later, a specifically pathological compensation for) the lack of self-knowledge. To recuperate “akimbo”—to reclaim excessive nothingness through Camp— would be to reassert the primacy of performance beyond the epistemological privileging of the real or the ontological prejudice of identity. To perform akimbo would be to set gestural practices against their final critical rereading as merely/too theatrical. To historicize akimbo would be to refute the naturalness of psychoanalytic discourses which have inscribed excess and nothingness as the content of homosexual psyches. Finally, to reclaim akimbo would be to reopen the space of refusal and (un)identification of the self closed by Locke, Shaftesbury, and other prophets of bourgeois morality at the end of the seventeenth century.
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Page 10 and 11: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to tha
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126 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION Case, Sue
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Plate 16 Liberace was Count Dracula
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THE CAMP TRACE IN CORPORATE AMERICA
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The key value, however, among these
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eternal youthfulness; and the way h
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7 TAKING OUT THE TRASH Camp and the
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homosocialism 35-6, 43-4 Hutcheon,
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